Dubya to The One ... the more things change

US President Barack Obama addresses a special sitting of Federal Parliament in the House of Representatives, Canberra, on November 17, 2011.

Reuters: Jason Reed

How things change. Eight years ago, when the last United States president stepped up to address 226 Australian politicians jammed into the Reps chamber like kids at a Wiggles gig, he was barely two minutes into the speech when the heckling started.

That was George Bush, a man whose every utterance bothered somebody or other, and whose explanation of the Iraq invasion (still fresh at that point, and Dubya's speech, archived here, dwells at length with what seems retrospectively rather misplaced optimism on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction) drove Greens senators Bob Brown and Kerry Nettle, wattle-sprigs aquiver with indignation, to their feet in vocal protest. For once, the English language – after bin Laden, Dubya's wiliest nemesis – did not flatfoot him. "I love free speech!" he beamed.

But this is the big O – Barack Obama. "The One", as Maureen Dowd calls him.

The One could probably invade Tasmania and no-one would mind, or not very much anyway. And the speech he gave yesterday would have been received entirely differently, had it been delivered by the 43rd president of the United States, rather than the 44th.

Everything, from the opening salutation (which revealed that Mr Obama pronounces the Australian Prime Minister's surname as if it rhymed with the word "canard", or "too hard", or – even worse – "galahed") to the muscular expression of intent vis a vis the Asia-Pacific region in general, would have been construed differently.

Can you imagine Dubya, mispronouncing our Prime Minister's name as he used our Parliament to disclose his expansionist intentions in our region?

Dubya, breezily declaring himself done with conflict in the Middle East, and proposing instead to shift his tanks to our backyard?

Dubya, snake-charming our PM into flogging nukes to India?

Bob Brown listened to the president's speech in polite silence yesterday, and lined up for a handshake with The One. Afterwards, he was as pleased as a nipper after a particularly gratifying session with Santa. "I asked President Obama to support world heritage listing for Antartica," the Greens leader reported to Twitter. "He said he'd look into it, and added to us Greens senators to 'keep up the good work'."

This is why politics is intriguing; sometimes, the identity of the orator is every bit as influential as the substance of what is actually said.

Barack Obama and Julia Gillard have a couple of things in common.

Both of them look better to foreigners than they do to their own constituencies.

Abroad, the Australian Government is admired for its slender deficit, and cited approvingly for its efforts to put a price on CO2 emissions, and its plucky defiance of Big Tobacco. But at home, it is thought dithering and ham-fisted.

Obama, an unbankable international rock star and revered communicator, is at home despised by Republicans, and commonly thought by Democrats to be a disappointment.

The other thing they have in common is that each leader has chosen one issue on which very nearly to destroy him or herself. In Obama's case, it was health care reform, a debate whose depth and rancour nearly polished him off. For Julia Gillard, it was putting a price on carbon emissions, a course of action towards which her Government had been bunny-hopping for a couple of years.

The weird thing is that neither leader can discuss their own issue with the other. For Australians, Obama's health struggles are beyond imagination; who knew it would be so hard to talk people into getting better health care? The Australian system, which we regard as unremarkable, qualifies as outright communism by American standards, so on health matters, polite mutual incomprehension seems the diplomatic order of the day.

And climate's not much better. America's lack of a federally mandated carbon scheme is half the reason why Julia Gillard's life is so hard. And Barack Obama knows that the task is beyond him; getting America to accept health care for its own poor nearly knocked him over, so the chances of convincing them to carry the can for China's poor? Non-existent, you'd have to think.